1. Field of the Invention
The subject invention relates to filing and organizing digital images and, more specifically, the invention relates to tagging and organizing digital images by way of a video game so as to enable search and browsing of the digital images.
2. Related Arts
A huge amount of digital photos are being created with the ubiquitous digital cameras, camera cellphones and PDAs. An important challenge is figuring out ways to store, manage, search and browse collections of digital photos and images. The current state of the art in automatic indexing of photos and images is not sufficient to support effective browsing, except in narrow domains. This problem can be attributed to the ‘semantic gap.” That is, the computer is effective at analyzing low-level image features (e.g. color, texture, shape) but human users generally want to formulate queries and browse images using higher semantic concepts (e.g. people, places, named entities, etc.). By tagging images with text labels, established techniques for information retrieval such as keyword search can be applied to facilitate searching and browsing. Text metadata also is crucial for emerging applications such as photo sharing in a social network community.
Tagging images can be most effectively done by humans; however, this is a tedious chore and there is little motivation for people to do it. One recent approach that has been successful is to use a game to tag images. As demonstrated by the online image tagging project at Carnegie Mellon University, online multi-player games can be an effective way to tag images on the Web.